How Many APs Is Too Many?

Technically, you can take all of exams out there, but that wouldn’t make too much sense, would it?

Usually the AP sign-up process happens around October, so you should decide beforehand how many APs you want to take.

Think about whether you going to self-study the APs or if you’re taking the AP classes, and also think about how busy you’re going to be a month or two months before the exam.

Do you have track or some other sport in the spring that will prevent you from studying as much you should for the exams? Or do you have some other extracurricular activities?

You should also consider the difficulty of the exams you are planning on taking. If you ‘re thinking about taking microeconomics and macroeconomics, in addition to three or four other easy APs you shouldn’t worry too much, but if you’re going to take AP chemistry, AP calculus, and a couple of other hard AP classes you better have a lot of time you can spend studying for those exams.

If you taking the AP class in school ask around and try to figure out how much you will have to study outside of the class and what the average AP score for the class in your school was in the previous year. If you will already do a lot of prep work in class, you don’t need to spend as much time outside of school getting ready for the exam, but if most of the people that only took the class got it two or three you will need to spend a lot of time studying for the exam outside of school.

Likewise, consider the difficulty of the exams you plan to self-study for. If it’s an easy class like economics, government, environmental science, or psychology that you can probably take all four of those in the same year without worrying too much. However, if you’re ready going to take a hard AP exam like calculus or chemistry, then we recommend picking a max of two easy exams to take in the same year.

Preferably, you should spread out your exams over all four years of your high school career, but if that’s not possible you should take a max of five or six AP exams per year.

Most schools recommend a max of four exams for their students, but if you’re dedicated, or if you planning on taking most of the easy exams you could take five or six of them in the same year.

Of course, you can always take more exams in a year, but you should probably start studying for them way before that two month period right before the exam.

If you already registered for an exam, but you don’t think you’re ready, we recommend you to try to take it and see what score you get. Sometimes you get lucky and the exam is easy, or the topics covered will be the exact same one as the ones that you studied and you will get a three or higher.

If you don’t get a good score, you can always cancel your scores for free, but if you don’t try then you would have wasted the $90 signup fee.